by J. Goodman

Created on: July 07, 2007

It's interesting that the topic title is finding' truth, not seeking' truth.

What is truth? Is it an absolute? Or is it relative? Or is it both? Most of western thought follows Plato for whom Truth was an absolute ideal. Today, however, many people allow for some relativity in the truth: what is true for you may not be true for me. If you ask two people what it is like to climb a mountain and one says, "Terrifying!" and the other says "Exhilarating!" both answers may be true for those particular people, yet not true for everyone.

What is true basically comes down to the questions, "How do we know what we know? How do we know when something is true?" We learn through our experiences, from what we are told, from what we feel, from what we imagine. Truth is not something separate from who we are as human beings. It was the philosopher William James who integrated the personality into sensory experience. James pointed out that if we see something beautiful or funny, we don't experience it and then afterwards think that it is beautiful or funny, we experience the beauty or the humour as part of our perception. And what one person finds beautiful or funny may be very different from what someone else considers beautiful or funny.

We believe many things that are outside our experience. For example, we believe that the earth revolves around the sun even though our daily experience is that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. We accept that there is scientific evidence to prove that the earth revolves around the sun even though we may never see the evidence itself. We believe what we are told by those we think know what is true outside our own individual experience.

If we took away truth learned from authoritative sources and relied completely on our own experience, we would know precious little. Most of what we accept as true in the world comes from what we were told by parents, teachers, books, and news reports. The philosopher Rene Descartes stripped away everything that he could not be absolutely sure of in life and came to the basic indisputable truth that the only thing he could say with complete certainty was that he existed, which he summed up in his famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am."

So we know at least one thing that is true, that we exist (or, at least, I exist, I don't know about you!). What is true beyond that? You will have to find out for yourself. Discovering truth is the journey of a lifetime.

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